Sunday, January 11, 2015

Rattlers (1976)

A middling entry in the seemingly
endless parade of nature-gone-wild movies that followed in the wake of Jaws (1975), this low-budget horror show
is serviceable but unimpressive. Oh, and in case you didn't receive the subtle
messaging in the title, it's about snakes. Rattlers
is fairly tame in terms of gore, and it has more than a few groan-inducing examples
of nonsensical character behavior and/or shaky plot twists. Nonetheless, it's
far from the worst example of its derivative genre, because some of the
snake-attack scenes are genuinely creepy, and the storyline contains such comfortingly
familiar elements as a secret military conspiracy. Viewers seeking actual
quality should of course look elsewhere, but creature-feature devotees are
accustomed to operating with diminished expectations. After the de rigeur opening
scene of a mysteriously unprovoked snake attack, reptile specialist Dr. Tom
Parkinson (Sam Chew) gets hired by a small-town police department to research
the incident. He's teamed with photographer Ann Bradley (Elisabeth Chauvet).
Tom analyzes unusual snake behavior even as further attacks occur, eventually
determining that a military base is the nexus of the problem. Thanks to a
conveniently loose-lipped junior officer, Tom learns that the base's commander
ordered the illegal disposal of an experimental nerve-gas agent near a nest of
rattlesnakes, hence the abnormally vicious animal behavior.

The plotting of Rattlers is stiffly mechanical, the
dialogue ranges from mediocre to substandard, and the characterizations are
inconsistent. For every quasi-credible scene (e.g., Ann explaining that she
became a feminist after watching her mother suffer through underpaid factory
work), there's something quite silly (e.g., Tom whisking Ann away for a sexy
evening in Vegas during the height of the rattler rampage). That said, the
movie more or less delivers when the time comes for proper suspense scenes—for
example, the bit of a utility worker trapped in the crawlspace beneath a house
while rattlers emerge from surrounding pipes is gruesomely exciting. And while the
makers of Rattlers go light on the
sleaze, considering the usual grimy textures of mid-'70s B-movies, director/cowriter
John McCauley indulges himself with a lurid scene of a young woman whose bubble
bath gets interrupted by snakes emerging from the faucet of her bathtub. All in
all, Rattlers taps into a pervasive
phobia, and since average people are more likely to stumble across rattlesnakes
in their lifetimes than they are to encounter some of the other predators in Jaws-era creature features (great white
sharks, grizzly bears, killer whales, and so on), there's something almost
grounded about the picture's premise.